Follow Sunlit Uplands by E-Mail

Friday, June 13, 2014

Is Spain Regaining Its Faith?

Like Quebec, Ireland, or Boston, Spain
has epitomized the fading of Catholic faith. In the twentieth century,
religious practice in Spain fell sharply, especially as the country
transitioned to democracy and resentment of the Church’s support for
Franco’s dictatorship surfaced.

Recently, however, the downward
trend has stopped and is recovering. According to Centro de
Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), the proportion of Spaniards
attending Mass has increased from 12.1 to 15 percent between 2011 and
2012. In absolute terms, the number of Spanish Catholics attending Mass
weekly grew by an astonishing further 23 percent between 2012 and 2013,
according to CIS. Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2013 the number of
Spaniards contributing part of their taxes to the Church rose from eight
to nine million.

Not only are Spaniards attending Mass more
frequently, but also youths are rediscovering the priesthood and
religious life. In 2013–2014, the number of Spanish diocesan seminarians
increased for a third consecutive year to 1321, a steady growth from
1227 in 2010–2011. Active female religious orders are also vibrant—each
year, about 400 Spanish girls become non-cloistered sisters, a slowly
increasing number. The number of women at the Poor Clares Convent of the
Ascension in Lerma has surged from 28 in 1994 to 134 in 2009. One of
the Lerma nuns, Sister Verónica, created her own community, Jesu
Communio. The Vatican approved the rapidly growing order, known as the
“sisters in jeans” because they wear denim habits, in 2010.

Immigration
cannot explain this growth in monastic and priestly vocations. Today,
young Spaniards are leaving the country for the more prosperous parts of
Latin America (especially Chile) and for Germany and Britain.
Considering Spain’s massive youth emigration and the fact that the
country has one of Europe’s lowest birth rates, Spain’s youth population
is shrinking, so this vocations rebound is more impressive.

Perhaps
no one puts a more attractive face on Spain’s return to Catholicism
than Olalla Oliveros. Last month, the 36-year-old Spanish model stunned
Spanish society by becoming a nun of the semi-cloistered Order of Saint
Michael. Perhaps Oliveros did this out of frustration? On the contrary,
she was at the height of her career and was recently offered a lead role
in a big-budget film. Oliveros experienced a conversion several years
back and made her decision after much thought.

Some
would dismiss these recent developments as resulting from the economic
crisis. Currently, unemployment in Spain is almost 27 percent; in the
European Union, only Greece suffers from a worse jobless rate. Spain
plunged into recession in 2008, with anemic GDP growth in recent
quarters. Perhaps Spaniards are rediscovering the pews and seminaries
because economic hardship is leading them to look for a last resort in
religion?

There are several reasons why this is not the case.
First, economic hardship is nothing new to Spain. In the early 1990s,
Spain also suffered from severe recession and unemployment reached 23
percent in 1993, nearly the current rate. Yet throughout the 1990s rates
of religious observance and vocations to the priesthood and religious
life declined.

A more dramatic example is the Great Depression,
the worst recession in Europe in a century. The 1930s did not revive
Spanish religiosity. On the contrary, anticlericalism then arguably
reached its climax in Spain’s history. In 1931, Prime Minister Manuel
Azaña declared that “Spain has ceased to be Catholic” and purged Spanish
public life of anything Christian. Meanwhile, during the 1936–1939
Spanish Civil War anticlerical, communist-sympathizing Republicans
murdered 7,000 priests, nuns, and seminarians with extreme brutality. In
his 1938 Homage to Catalonia George Orwell was astonished by how quickly Catalonian society was discarding its Catholic identity.

Furthermore,
Spain is not only experiencing a religious revival of its society, but
its public sphere is also turning away from the moral relativism of Jose
Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s government (2004–2011). In 2005, Zapatero
legalized same-sex “marriage” and the adoption of children by homosexual
couples. In 2010 Zapatero’s government legalized abortion on demand.
Also, Zapatero made “express divorce” legal, ended mandatory religious
education in schools and removed crucifixes from public buildings.

However,
today’s government of Mariano Rajoy is challenging Zapatero’s
revolution. Currently, it is pushing a bill banning abortion except when
the pregnancy results from rape or threatens the mother’s health or
life. The bill would make Spanish legislation as pro-life as it has been
since 1985. Spanish elites feel that Zapatero went too far in
de-Christianization.

Ireland, too, has also suffered economically.
However, Irish Catholicism remains in the doldrums since the economic
collapse; no trends similar to the Spanish ones can be observed there.
The number of Irish youths entering seminary remains depressingly low;
many Irish parishes are closing; popular and political pressure to
embrace same-sex “marriage” and abortion are mounting; Mass attendance
in Dublin is fast approaching the single digits with no end in sight.
Ireland demonstrates that economic depression does not necessarily cause
religious revival.

What, then,
accounts for this surprising turnaround in the state of Spanish
Catholicism? Perhaps it can be partially attributed to Pope Benedict
XVI, sometimes criticized by some for excessively focusing on the
re-evangelization of Western societies, being a Don Quixote trying to
resurrect Christendom where it is obviously dead. Yet Spain mattered to
Benedict. He visited the country three times, attracting some of the
largest crowds of his pontificate.

Spain’s slight retreat from
secularization can’t simply be chalked up to economic difficulties.
Something else is at play, whether a response to Benedict’s summoning of
Europe to return to its roots, a rediscovery of the beauty of religious
life, weariness with Zapatero’s secularist aggression, or something
else entirely.

For some time, many had predicted that Spanish
Catholicism would share the fate of the woolly mammoth and that Gothic
churches in would be turned into pizzerias and discotheques. However,
Spanish Catholicism is regaining a vibrancy it has not seen in decades.
When Pope Francis visits Spain next year, he will find a struggling
local Church, but one where Catholic culture is being visibly reborn.

Filip Mazurczak has an MA in international relations from The George Washington University. He is a regular contributor to Katolicki Miesi?cznik LIST and has published in a variety of magazines, including The European Conservative, Visegrad Insight, and Tygodnik Powszechny. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

No comments:

This website is dedicated to a renewal of Christian culture. It is inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, a valiant defender of Christian civilization, who believed "we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries." With Churchill, we believe that a "fraternal association" of the English-speaking peoples must "for their own safety and for the good of all walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.”